Three Cheers for the U.K. Parliament—and the British Public

[Update: On Thursday evening, Parliament rejected military action in Syria by a vote of 285 to 272.]

Not before time, the public and its elected officials have taken a stand against the rush to bomb Syria—an action that could embroil the United States in a bloody civil war and lead us down a path to goodness knows where. The public in question turned out to be the British, but no matter. All popular movements have to start someplace. Now it’s up to the American people and their representatives to demand a similar pause for reflection and political debate.

After yesterday’s dramatic developments in London, which culminated in Prime Minister David Cameron delaying a parliamentary vote to authorize British participation in an American-led attack, President Obama faces the choice of putting off the bombing or going ahead without the support of America’s closest European ally. Should he choose to hold off for a few days, which seems likely, it will give Congress time to consider the matter, and to schedule a vote approving military action. Until now, the White House has resisted such a vote, and the Republican leadership has stopped short of demanding one. But now that Britain has allowed the people’s representatives to have a say, and also given the U.N. inspectors in Syria some time to complete their investigation of last week’s awful gas attack, the political dynamic in Washington may change.

Let’s hope it does. Until Wednesday night London time, David Cameron, Britain’s Prime Minister, was all gung-ho about launching a missile attack on the forces of Bashar al-Assad. But Cameron hadn’t reckoned on the protests of the British Parliament—or, more accurately, of the British public.

Opinion polls show that ordinary Britons are against military action by a majority of about two-to-one, and the skepticism extends to many supporters of the Conservative-Liberal coalition. In recent days, the voters have been besieging their M.P.s with phone calls and messages, and their protests have had an effect. “Grateful for all the emails I’m receiving from constituents about Syria,” the Conservative M.P. Zac Goldsmith wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. “Unlike so many cut-and-paste jobs, they are authentic & heart-felt.”

When Cameron’s aides took soundings about a House of Commons vote scheduled for later today authorizing military action, they realized that up to seventy Tories could well vote against the measure or abstain, and that didn’t count likely Liberal defectors. The government has a majority in the Commons of just seventy-seven. Faced with the prospect of, at best, an embarrassingly narrow victory, and, at worst, a humiliating defeat that could even have marked the end of his premiership, Cameron backed down and scheduled a second vote for early next week, after the U.N. inspectors have completed their report about the gas attack outside of Damascus. Today’s vote will go ahead, but it will be next week’s vote that really counts.

The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, was the one who tabled an amendment calling for a second vote. Until a couple of days ago, he seemed perfectly willing to join Cameron in supporting a U.S. military strike as long as a government lawyer could be found to declare it legal, which is seldom a problem. Facing outraged protests from many Labour supporters, and a possible rebellion from the party’s backbench M.P.s, Miliband altered course—prompting howls of outrage from Downing Street. “Number Ten and the Foreign Office think Miliband is a f****\* c** and a copper-bottomed shit,” a government source told the Times of London. (Thanks to Sebastian Payne, the online editor of the Spectator, for pointing me to this quote.)

Miliband is busy claiming credit for the delay, and he does deserve some praise. But this was really a success for the public, not the politicians. On all sides of the political divide in Britain, there is profound disquiet about lining up behind the U.S. government in another military strike on a Middle Eastern country. Even the Sun, the bellicose tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, had to acknowledge that its normally jingoistic readers had little appetite for what many see as a second Iraq debacle in the making. “Brits say no to war in Syria,” blared a headline yesterday on a story about the paper’s own poll, which showed that just twenty-five per cent of respondents favored using British ships, located off the coast of Syria, to fire missiles at military sites inside the country.

It turns out that the polling firm that carried out the Sun’s survey, You Gov, has also been surveying people on this side of the Atlantic about their attitudes to the Syrian crisis. And, lo and behold, Americans are almost as skeptical of military action as Britons are. Fifty-nine per cent of them say that the United States should stay out of the Syrian conflict completely. Just thirty-seven per cent support airstrikes against Syrian government targets, and a mere fifteen per cent think that the United States should help the Syrian rebels. All the publicity about the gas attack doesn’t seemed to have altered opinions much. “As it did two months ago, the public rejects the argument that the United States has a responsibility to do anything about the fighting in Syria,” the polling firm reported, “and rejects it by margins similar to how it felt then.”

The message from ordinary Britons and Americans could hardly be more clear. Over the next few days, it will be interesting to see if anybody in Washington pays much attention to it.

Above: British Prime Minister David Cameron. Photograph by Dan Kitwood/Getty.